Georgetown, Ontario singer-songwriter Aynsley Saxe explores the complicated intersection of love, fear, and inevitable heartbreak on her latest single, “Straight Into Disaster,” the eighth release from her forthcoming sophomore album, A Thousand Stars, arriving in 2027.
Some relationships are impossible to resist, even when the warning signs are impossible to ignore. On “Straight Into Disaster,” Saxe captures the intoxicating rush of falling in love when heartbreak feels inevitable.
Carried by just an acoustic guitar and bass, the song captures the dizzying rush of falling hard for someone while knowing the relationship has an expiry date. Saxe wrote it after her marriage ended, as she found her way back into a dating world that had changed completely since she last stepped into it.
Aynsley Saxe Straight Into Disaster – The Story Behind the Song
“I wrote ‘Straight Into Disaster’ when I was entering the dating world again after my marriage ended,” she says. “Being back in the dating scene was very foreign to me and everything had changed dramatically since I had last dated in my twenties. Eventually I was willing to meet new people, but I definitely wasn’t ready to get hurt again. At first, I think I unconsciously chose to meet people who weren’t necessarily compatible with me in the long run so I could get my feet wet again without getting hurt. Well, as the saying goes, ‘humans make plans and the universe laughs’. That strategy backfired entirely and ‘Straight Into Disaster’ was written.”
What came out of that experience is a song about holding on with both hands while the clock ticks down.
“When you know your relationship is ultimately going to end it creates a lot of emotion and a push-pull feeling,” Saxe explains. “You don’t know if you should hang on and enjoy your time with the person for longer or let go because you know you’re not right together in the long run. ‘Straight Into Disaster’ is about that feeling of love juxtaposed onto fear. It’s about the moments when you’re trying to delay the inevitable crash into heartbreak that is looming. It’s about the complexity and vulnerability created knowing a relationship will end but wanting it to last as long as possible even amidst the inevitable forthcoming loss.”
She describes the feeling with one striking image.
“‘Straight Into Disaster’ to me feels like being compelled to walk a tightrope over rushing treacherous water,” she says. “While walking you have this beautiful glowing feeling but you’re deeply afraid knowing that you’re going to crash at any time. But the feeling while walking is not just scary – it’s also so powerful and beautiful that you keep walking the tightrope as long as you possibly can. It’s this strange contrast between love and impending doom that inspired the song.”
Recording “Straight Into Disaster” at Mill Town Sound
Saxe produced the track with co-producer Christian Turner at Mill Town Sound in Milton, Ontario. Turner played the acoustic and bass guitars and handled the engineering, mixing, and mastering.
The pair had already recorded several songs for A Thousand Stars together, and that familiarity gave the session an easy, unhurried confidence.
“Christian Turner and I put this one down very quickly at Mill Town Sound in Milton, ON,” Saxe says. “Similar to many of the other songs on ‘A Thousand Stars’ he picked out an acoustic guitar part he thought would fit after hearing me perform it and I loved it immediately. Christian tracked the acoustic and bass guitars and then the vocals were added. The recording was completed quite quickly because for this song I felt like less was more. I didn’t want to add piano or background vocals on the recorded track. I wanted the vocals and acoustic guitar to carry the whole song and the bass guitar to ground it. Because Christian and I had recorded other songs for ‘A Thousand Stars’ before ‘Straight Into Disaster’, we had our routine down well and our musical collaboration gelled easily.”
Early listeners have found comfort inside the storm.
One described the song as “So pure. So ethereal. So heartbreaking. Raw, unadorned heartbreak, delivered with love and delicacy.”
Another shared, “The smooth textures of Aynsley’s voice are somehow healing even as she gently guides me into troubled waters. I feel safe like everything will be okay in the end.”
Aynsley Saxe Creates a Dreamlike Music Video
Saxe also edited the music video for “Straight Into Disaster” herself, pairing photographs by Allison Clark, who also photographed the single’s cover, with dramatic imagery of stormy oceans, fiery skies, and quaking earth.
“For the music video I decided that I would let the weight of the lyrics and the feeling carry it in an artistic dreamlike scape,” she says. “I chose to use a few photos shot by photographer Allison Clark to help portray the feeling of longing and desire juxtaposed on treacherous natural scenes like stormy oceans, fiery backgrounds, and earthquakes. I wanted the feeling of being mesmerized to be portrayed over the larger landscape of powerlessness and doom. In the images I don’t look at the surrounding disaster at all which is impossible to ignore. I’m just looking straight ahead. The one photo in the video I find especially unsettling is where I’m laughing but I’m inside a disastrous landscape with a storm and choppy waves surrounding me. It seems like such a strange image to be laughing amidst such a catastrophe but nods to the lyric ‘We’re living on borrowed time, laughing like we’re out of our minds’. Viewers who have seen my video ‘For Keeps’ will notice that I used some of these same photos in that video which has some of the same themes.”
The visual storytelling has also introduced Saxe to another creative outlet.
“Creating videos for my singles that I’ve released for my upcoming album ‘A Thousand Stars’ has opened a larger creative sphere in me than I ever anticipated, and I’ve been loving diving into the editing process.”
A Thousand Stars: Aynsley Saxe’s Most Personal Album Yet
A Thousand Stars has been unfolding one single at a time since June 2025.
“Stranger to Myself” explored isolation and reinvention, followed by “Next Level Love.” “For Keeps” dug into longing and heartbreak, while “Never Seen Stars Like These Before” celebrated emotional safety and wonder.
“When You Go” faced devastating loss, and her earlier single, “Silhouette,” previously featured on Canadian Beats, captured the ease of falling in love, while “There’s A Raven Waiting” explored intuition, mystery, and spiritual curiosity.
Together, the album’s 12 songs represent Saxe’s most personal work to date.
“I’m getting more personal than comfortable,” she says.
“If ‘A Thousand Stars’ is a journey through the peaks and valleys of romantic love,” she adds, “‘Straight Into Disaster’ is one of the songs in the low valley highlighting deep love juxtaposed against inevitable loss.”
Meet Canadian Singer-Songwriter Aynsley Saxe
Saxe began piano lessons at age six and wrote her first song at 18 while living on a farm in New Zealand during a youth exchange.
Influenced by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, she developed an appreciation for songwriting that reveals emotional truths through carefully chosen words.
She later earned an Honours B.A. in English and Film from Western University, bringing a literary and cinematic perspective to her music.
Her debut album, Take Me As I Am, arrived in 2013 with a launch before a capacity crowd at Toronto’s Hugh’s Room. Its first single, “Stop, Drop & Roll (The Fireman Song),” appeared in a province-wide commercial for the Saskatchewan Firefighters 2013 Charity Calendar.
In 2019, a grant from the Town of Halton Hills helped her record “Beautiful Tomorrow (A Song for Our Planet),” featuring 20 children on backing vocals.
Throughout her career, Saxe has composed music for independent films, performed sold-out Toronto shows, and studied with respected songwriters and vocal coaches across Canada and the United States.
Her years teaching Reiki have also influenced her intuitive approach to songwriting, something listeners often describe as healing.
With “Straight Into Disaster,” Saxe continues exploring the vulnerability of love and the complicated emotions that come with knowing something beautiful may not last.
She knew the ending from the first kiss, kept her eyes straight ahead, and kept walking. “Straight Into Disaster” makes every step of that tightrope feel worth the fall.
Aynsley Saxe Straight Into Disaster – Five Questions With
Hi, Aynsley! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Hi! I’m Aynsley Saxe, a Canadian singer-songwriter from Georgetown, Ontario. I’ve been playing music since I was six years old, when I first started learning piano. The piano feels like another limb to me – an extension of my body – and it’s where I feel most at home. Music doesn’t feel like something I do so much as something I need, like sunlight or water. It’s where I feel most connected to myself, almost as if I can hear my own heartbeat more clearly there. Sometimes I feel an almost irresistible pull to get to the piano, as though something beyond me is guiding me there. Whatever that force is, it feels deeply good and familiar. I honestly can’t imagine my life without music or the ability to create it.
I’m endlessly curious about spirituality and what it means to live a meaningful life. I’m highly intuitive and tend to experience the world on a pretty deep, energetic level. I feel things intensely, and songwriting has become a way to process those feelings, make sense of my experiences, and turn them into something meaningful. If sharing those experiences through music helps someone else feel a little less alone in what they’re going through, then that’s the real magic of it for me.
My upcoming sophomore album, A Thousand Stars, is definitely the most personal thing I’ve ever put out into the world. I wrote these songs while going through the ups and downs of letting go of one life and figuring out how to begin another after the end of my marriage. It’s really a collection of songs about the many sides of love—from the excitement and magic of falling for someone to heartbreak, healing, and finding your way back to yourself.
Some people buy a fancy car or take an expensive vacation after a big life change. I decided to write and record an album instead! I’ve already released eight singles from A Thousand Stars, and I’m having a lot of fun with the process of rolling them out one at a time throughout 2027. Rather than releasing the album all at once, I love the idea of slowly opening up its different chapters and letting each song tell its own story.
You wrote “Straight Into Disaster” after your marriage ended, when you were navigating the dating world for the first time in years. You’ve said you initially chose people you didn’t see a long-term future with because you thought it would protect you from getting hurt. Looking back, do you think you were protecting your heart, or were you afraid of allowing yourself to fall in love again?
Navigating dating when I hadn’t been single for many years – and never expected to be single again – was tricky. Eventually I was interested in meeting new people but I realize now that at first I was mostly trying to learn about who I was and what I wanted at this unexpected juncture in my life.
Looking back, I think I was curious about how it would feel to come out of the romantic painful abyss I had been in. At the time I had less than zero expectations – and no real hope or optimism – for my love life. I wasn’t outwardly pessimistic, but I was still coming back from the dead, and I was coming with scars that I’d healed the best I could alone, but I knew the next step in my healing was to step cautiously into the dating world again.
I don’t think I was consciously thinking too much about getting hurt when I first started dating again, partly because I had forgotten what being in love felt like. And when you haven’t felt that kind of connection in a long time, you can start to believe that maybe nobody could really affect you that deeply again.
I’m sure there was some unconscious self-protection going on, and I probably gravitated toward people who weren’t necessarily a good fit for me long term. But when I first dipped my toes back into the dating world, I wasn’t thinking about long-term anything. I think I was mostly just curious to see if I still had a pulse in that department!
At the same time, I wonder if there was another part of me that actually wanted to know whether I could still be hurt. Whether I could still feel that deeply about someone. Maybe, on some level, I was even tempting fate to prove that I could. And, well, it turns out I could!
I think one of the difficult things about going through a separation, and this was certainly true for me, is that it can really shake your trust in yourself. You can start questioning your own judgement and wondering whether you got it wrong by committing to something that ultimately didn’t last as long as you’d imagined, or that ended up creating such a big storm in your life.
But looking back now, I don’t see it that way anymore. I believe that certain experiences find their way into our lives and give us opportunities to grow, although we always have a choice in how we respond to them. We can resist the experience, or we can try to lean into it and allow it to change us in a meaningful way.
I think the real challenge is figuring out how to let those storms shape us for the better. Maybe they teach us to open our hearts more, or to develop a strength we didn’t know we had, or to see ourselves and the world a little differently. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize any of that while you’re actually in the middle of it. You can only see it once you’ve come out the other side.
I really believe in the idea of never letting good pain go to waste. If something difficult is going to change your life, I think there’s something powerful about finding a way to let it change you for the better.
The song explores falling deeply for someone while knowing the relationship has an expiry date. Why do you think we sometimes hold on the tightest when we know something isn’t going to last? And did writing this song change how you understood that particular relationship?
I think, as humans, we hold on because letting go is genuinely scary. It takes trust, and it takes courage. In so many ways, it feels completely counterintuitive to release a person, a relationship, or a situation that we desperately want to keep in our lives. We can know deep down that something needs to end, but knowing that doesn’t make letting go any less painful. So we stall. We find ways to rationalize staying, convince ourselves that maybe things will change, or come up with a million different ways to avoid feeling the pain of what we already know. I think we’re pretty hardwired to protect ourselves from pain, even when avoiding it ultimately keeps us stuck, and in a different kind of pain.
Writing this song was cathartic for me, as were so many of the songs on A Thousand Stars. I think the process of writing it allowed me to see the relationship more clearly. It brought me face to face with things I had been trying not to see or acknowledge. That was a painful gift that I needed to ultimately see. I saw the beauty of the relationship and the inevitable heartbreak of the expiry date that was woven into it. The love and painful dread existed simultaneously. And I think there’s something really important about being able to acknowledge both without having to diminish either one.
You’ve described ‘A Thousand Stars’ as your most personal work yet, saying you’re getting “more personal than comfortable.” What has been the hardest truth about yourself to put into a song, and has sharing these experiences publicly changed the way you approach love, heartbreak or vulnerability in your own life?
When I first started sharing these songs, I realized I was opening up about a pretty personal journey, one that had taken me to some of the most vulnerable edges of myself. I don’t know if there was one specific thing I was worried about, but I think I did have some reservations about being judged, particularly when it came to sharing such an honest account of life before and after separation.
What’s surprised me is that the more songs I’ve released, and the more time that’s passed, the more comfortable I’ve become with being vulnerable. As some of those old wounds have healed, I’ve actually found myself wanting to share even more. I started out feeling a little shy and exposed, but somewhere along the way, that shifted into a kind of confidence. I feel almost emboldened to put more of myself out there, and I wasn’t expecting that.
I think what I’m really searching for is that moment of connection when a song reaches someone in a way that’s deeply personal to them. When someone tells me, for example, that they burst into tears listening to “Stranger to Myself” because it describes exactly what they’re going through, I think, Okay, this is why I’m doing this. It’s such a powerful feeling to know that something so personal to me can resonate so deeply with someone else. It makes all the vulnerability worthwhile.
The recording of “Straight Into Disaster” is incredibly stripped back, with just your voice, acoustic guitar and bass, while the video surrounds you with storms, earthquakes and other disasters. Why did you want the music to feel so intimate while the visuals feel so chaotic? What do you hope listeners recognize about their own relationships when they experience the two together?
“Straight Into Disaster” is musically very gentle, delicate, and almost fragile, while the lyrics tell a story of impending heartbreak. I wanted to carry that contrast into the video by juxtaposing the feeling of being deeply in love with the knowledge that it has an expiry date. I think deep love and deep fear can absolutely coexist, and when they do, they can create a pretty extraordinary whirlwind of emotions. That tension and complexity are what I was hoping to capture, both in the song and in the visuals.
I suppose what I’d like people to take away from it is that it’s okay not to have everything figured out. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we’re feeling several conflicting things at once, and there’s no easy way to reconcile them. That’s part of being human. Sometimes you just have to let yourself feel it all and welcome the ride, even when you have no idea where it’s going to take you.
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